Samsung has unveiled its 10-nanometer LPDDR4 6GB mobile DRAM which is probably heading for the much rumoured Galaxy Note 6 in August this year.

According to Huanquie the Galaxy Note 6 is going to feature a 5.8-inch ‘Slim RGB’ AMOLED display with a Snapdragon 823 processor with 6GB of RAM. The Galaxy Note 6 is rumoured to have an iris scanner, if you have any that need scanning.

Now it seems that the Note 6 will be the first consumer device from Samsung to feature its LPDDR4 6GB DRAM, it will also end up in the Galaxy S8 but that was sort of a given.

Built on the 10nm process the 6GB DRAM should provide more power while consuming less energy and extend the battery life . Samsung has started firmware development for the Galaxy Note 6 and that the handset is likely to arrive in August.

The Cadence Denali DDR controller IP, and both the Denali DDR4 and LPDDR4 PHY IP, have speeds of up to 3200 Mbps, and each are in production with several customers.

Hugh Durdan, vice president of design IP at Cadence said: “Memory interface performance is crucial for alleviating the key system bottleneck of memory access, which can overshadow increases in processor performance. The high performance of Cadence's Denali DDR interface solutions supports the demanding data bandwidth requirements of various applications, including mobile, cloud computing and networking.”

The DDR4/3/3L controller and PHY IP have both dual in-line memory module (DIMM) and discrete DDR memory devices.This solution is used for servers, RAID storage, networking processors and several other networking ASICs. The LPDDR4/3 controller and PHY IP, has been validated with both package-on-package (POP) and discrete LPDDR memory devices.

This IP solution is widely used in customer applications such as smartphones, tablets and automotive infotainment. The combination of the IP solutions' robust architecture, design guidelines and Cadence technical expertise has enabled customers to ramp their systems into volume production with DDR interfaces operating at speeds up to 3200 Mbps.

Hynix is a big name in the memory industry, and since phones are becoming small, yet quite powerful computers, it doesn’t come as a surprise that new memory standards are making their way to flagship phones.

Hynix has confirmed that it is the first company to ship LP DDR4 memory that ended up in a commercial smartphone, as we predicted a few months back.

Hynix is shipping 8Gb LPDDR4 (Low Power Double Data Rate 4) that is used in the LG G Flex 2 phone. This phone was announced at CES 2015 back in January, but we still haven’t seen it shipping to end-customers.

The 20nm LPDDR4 memory has double the transfer rate that increased from 1600Mbps with LPDDR3 to 3200Mbps with LPDDR4. At the same time LPDDR4 needs 1.1V, which is 0.1V less than what you need with LPDDR3 at 1.2V. It's not a lot, but it matters.

We are sure that some other flagship phones that will be introduce on March 1 at the Mobile World Congress 2015 will also come with LPDDR4 support. The Snapdragon 810 does support this memory interface and not only does it it doubles the data rate throughput, it also results in less power consumption for the whole phone.

Research firm IHS predicts that 36 percent of premium smartphones might end up using LPDDR4 next year. We are sure that a lot of premium phones will end up with LPDDR4 this year, and we also hope that USB 3.0, also part of the Snapdragon 810 chip specification, will finally make its way to next-generation flagship smartphones that are coming in less than a month.

Samsung has started mass producing LPDDR4 memory and is hoping to sell the chips for 2015 high-end phones. These are 20nm memory chips and LPDDR4 will be supported by some SoCs.

Qualcomm has already made a public announcement that its Snapdragon 810 supports LPDDR4 1600MHz dual-channel 64-bit (25.6GBps) which is an indication that Samsung’s LPDDR4 as big as 4GB might find its way to some top phones of 2015. Samsung claims the new 20nm 8Gb LPDDR4 offers twice the performance and density compared to 4Gb LPDDR3 which was based on 20nm-class process technology.

Samsung executive Joo Sun Choi, Executive Vice President of Memory Sales and Marketing, added: “By initiating production of the 20nm 8Gb LPDDR4, which is even faster than the DRAM for PCs and servers and consumes much less energy, we are contributing to the timely launch of UHD, large-screen flagship mobile devices.”

Maybe this is Samsung's way of hinting its Galaxy S6 might come with a higher density screen than 1920x1080 that we saw with Galaxy 5. The 2560x1600 that we saw with LG G3 comes to mind.

With an I/O data rate of up to 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps), the new 8Gb LPDDR4 can support UHD video recording and playback and continuous shooting of high-resolution images with over 20 megapixels. In case of a 2GB package, an 8Gb LPDDR4-based 2GB package can save up to 40 percent of power compared to a 4Gb LPDDR3-based 2GB package, due to low operating voltages and faster processing.

Samsung started shipping its 2GB LPDDR4 and 3GB LPDDR4 DRAM packages this month based on 8Gb and 6Gb LPDDR4 dies and you can expect to see them in phones coming in early 2015.

4GB LPDDR4 will start shipping in early 2015 without an exact date or timeframe at the press time. It will be interesting that only the highest end Intel processors, Haswell-E Extreme edition parts, will use DDR4 as the memory and that phones will get DDR4 before notebooks.

The DDR market is rather predictable, after DDR2 comes DDR3 followed by DDR4 and will probably be followed by DDR5. The Low Power market is no exception.

Most mainstream to high end phones are powered by LPDDR3 memory and this includes the latest iPhone, Samsung Note or Galaxy, LG G3 or HTC One M8 phones among others.

The future, or early 2015 to be more precise, brings the LPDDR4 a next generation mobile DRAM standard. LPDDR4 launches with an I/O data rate of 3200 MT/s and a target speed of 4266 MT/s, compared to 2133 MT/s for LPDDR3. It also operates with 1.1V, a 10 percent lower voltage compared to 1.2 with LPDDR3. The LPDDR4 standard is very fresh as JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) has announced the final specification on August 25th 2014. In case you are not familiar with the term, JEDEC is an independent semiconductor engineering trade organization and standardization body.

Samsung has managed to double the clock rate from the current 800 MHz with LPDDR3 to 1600MHz with LPDDR4, increasing the total memory bandwidth from 12.8GB/s with LPDDR3 to 25.6 GB/s DRAMeXchange expects that one percent of Samsung market share in DDR memory will be LPDDR4, but in a year's time, in Q4 2015, DRAMeXchange expects that Samsung's LPDDR4 market share could expand to 30 percent of total LPDDR4 supplies.

SK Hynix, another big name in the DDR industry, expects to grow from the current 1 percent to 18 percent in a year. US based Micron has not yet entered the LPDDR4 market but it is expected that the company can capture a good 25 percent of it in Q4 2015. Qualcomm has officially confirmed that its 2015 flagship Snapdragon 810 supports LPDDR4 1600MHz Dual-channel 64-bit (25.6GBps) memory and we expect that a lot of top brands in the phone industry based their high end phones on this chip. Have in mind that only the Snapdragon 810 supports LPDDR4 while Snapdragon 808, 805, 801 and a bit older 800 are stuck with the LPDDR3.

We expect Nvidia Erista to feature LPDDR4 support, while Mediatek and Intel will probably announce its LPDDR4 SoCs next year. No word on Apple's next generation SoC, but Apple does not tend to be behind the curve, so we would be surprised if it did not go LPDDR4 next year, too.

A modern phone with 2GB of memory works just fine and since all Android chips and the OS itself support 32-bit mode only, it doesn’t makes much sense to jump over 3.5GB anytime soon.

Still, 64-bit support for Android might be coming after all and Samsung has a solution for people who want more than 3GB on their phone. Samsung has announced the first 8 gigabit (Gb) 4GB RAM module based on low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4 memory).

It is a 20nm chip and has the lowest energy consumption and higher density to date. Four 8Gb dies combine to offer a single 4GB module we should see them in smartphones and tablets in the near future.

With 3.1 Gbps bandwidth the new LPDDR4 can deliver a 50 percent speed boost over the existing DDR3 and LPDDR3 based chips. Samsung also claims that LPDDR4 will enable a data transfer rate per pin of 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps), which is twice that of the 20nm-class LPDDR3 DRAM.

The Samsung claims that the chip needs 1.1 volts which is 40 percent less than what you would need for 20nm DDR3 chips and mass production starts in 2014.

It is not known when we can expect to see phones and tablets based on LPDDR4 anytime soon, but a dreamer can hope that phones such as Samsung Galaxy S5 might end up using one. After all this should be the next big thing, at least this is what Samsung wants you to believe.